Early this morning after the election, I went across town to a regularly scheduled medical appointment. At that early hour, the New York streets were full of people going to work or school. Everyone seemed to be doing what people probably would have been doing had there not been an election. It was a salutary reminder that life is about more than politics.
That said, today we need to talk about politics. The American people have overwhelmingly elected the most problematic presidential candidate in modern history, with potentially catastrophic consequences for many Americans, for immigrants, and for the world order we have known for decades. The severity of the challenge to democratic institutions and norms that the country will face in the next few months and years will be unprecedented. It will be a dark and difficult time for America.
Meanwhile, we have just had an election, and it behooves us to analyze its meaning and import. Not only did Trump win in the Electoral College, but he appears also to have won the popular vote. If so, he would be the first Republican to do so in 20 years. He overwhelmingly improved over his past performance in much of the country (apparently getting the largest vote-share of any Republican since 1988). It was a genuinely stunning popular victory, which also confirms what an angry and divided country this is at present.
Undoubtedly, critics will now attack Kamala Harris' campaign. While I think more analysis is called for, my sense is that she ran about as good a campaign as she could. Perhaps, a different candidate might have done better, but I believe the basic lesson of the election is a strong popular rejection of contemporary liberalism and the liberal "establishment." Obviously, the cultural issues the Democrats thought might carry them to victory could not overcome the widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden Administration and especially with its handling of the economy and immigration. While it may be true that the U.S. economy is in fact the envy of the rest of the world, the Democrats' seeming insensitivity to how ordinary Americans actually experience the economy seems to have doomed their efforts to change the subject to cultural concerns.
Whether a different candidate could have done better than Harris is really also a question about Joe Biden's initial insistence on running for a second term. That became unsustainable after the June debate; but it is possible that, if he had announced at the end of 2022 that he would not run again, the subsequent primary process might have produced a better candidate (or even made Harris a better candidate). But it is really hard to see what more Harris could have done, given the strong headwinds she was facing.
There probably will be an argument about whether her "popular front" strategy made the most sense. She apparently premised her campaign on the belief that lots of centrist voters (including many anti-Trump Republicans) would support her. In the end, there do not seem to be many such centrists left! On the other hand, it would seem almost ludicrous to argue that an alternative, more leftist, "progressive" campaign strategy would have wooed many voters away from Trump. Whatever may be said for or against "progressive" politics, the reality is that "progressive" politics tends to read the culture wrong.
"Populism" is ultimately an electoral NO to continued rule by the elite governing political class, which the Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans represent right now. The election results undercut any moderate Republican argument for some sort of recidivist Reaganism. More importantly, however, the election was a great rebuke to contemporary post-cold-war liberalism and especially to its increasingly "woke" expressions, which appear increasingly irrelevant to ordinary people's lives and offensive to their moral values. How the Democrats sort this out in the inevitable internal party struggle that is ahead may determine what, if any, prospects for success the Democratic party may have in the near future.